Who are Evolution Treks Peru?
Evolution Treks Peru is about Fair Trade Tourism, Empowering Women, Ethical traveling and Sustainable and Eco-friendly practices. We are Socially conscious.
At the center of our philosophy is an ancient Andean form of economic and social organization which is called Ainy. Ainy means reciprocity, the ability of people to recompense each other for anything they receive in order to improve the lives of the community. In this case the community we talk about is our clients and our workers.
Our uniqueness resides in the way our company is structured, the type of philosophy that leads our work and the way we attempt to change the travel industry in Cusco.
Never before in the travel industry of Peru, have people tried to build a collective of individuals, women and men, to partake and share in both responsibilities of the company and its benefits.
In trying to keep our ancient traditions and world view, we opted to stick to what our ancestors had successfully practiced for millennia.
That is the reason why this is a worker-owned company.
Our organization reflects both our commitment to preserve our culture and our mission of providing a superb service to our clients while inspiring others to take our example as a way to develop their communities sustainably.
The following lines describe both the working conditions of porters on the inca trail and other hiking routes and our views about how sustainable and ecological practices ought to be.
Porters on the trail are overloaded with weight, they lack proper working conditions, i.e. appropriate clothing for the type of work they perform, tents to sleep in and nutritional food. The Inca trail rules establish that porters carry max 20kg of weight. However, no travel company can say that they honestly comply with these regulations. In honest truth, we ask anyone who has completed the Inca trail to tell us whether they have ever checked the weight that their porters carried or they believed at face value what their tour guides told them.
In that same spirit, we encourage anyone of our clients to check the weight that our porters carry and the working conditions they have.
All of our porters have proper camping gear.
We are the only company operating tours on the Inca trail that supplies with sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and proper camping tents to our porters.
To achieve the goal of making sure that our porters carry what is legally allowed and to ensure that they receive overall good working conditions we were presented with a huge challenge. The problem of how to do that without compromising the service we give to our clients.
So, we had to reinvent the way tours are operated on the Inca trail.
We included women porters in our hiking tours. Something that other companies never dared to try.
Women porters became a breakthrough in the way sustainable tourism is done.
Also, we replaced our old and heavy tents and camping gear with newer, lightweight state of the art camping gear.
Our cooks came up with a different type of menu that we could feed both our clients and our staff. These new, tasty, healthy and nutritionally balanced meals were created in order to cut the use of packed foods to reduce the weight produced by the packaging and containers. Nowadays, we rely more on organic products sourced along the trail.
We have also decided not to carry toilet tents and use what the park had provided for us. Toilet tents are supposed to be eco-friendly, but the Inca trail administration does not supply with an area to dispose of the human waste. In light of this limitation and to do both, avoid pollution and carry unnecessary weight we decided not to offer this service. Please check our video on what is an eco-friendly toilet and what is not.
In addition, Whenever we exceed the maximum weight allowed for porters, we hire extra porters. local native people who help us carry our bundles into the Inca Trail.
Finally, this reduction in weight has allowed us to be the first and only company that supplies our porters with proper camping tents for them to rest at night.